Quotes

"’Snow Cherries from France’ took a long time to write, yes. That’s seven years, maybe. I finally finished it this summer [2003] and it’s not that it was just finished as far as the song goes, but I couldn’t seem to find the point of view to sing it. I went back and forth depending on if I were mean at my husband or not, it kept changing. But then finally, I found a place with it that I began to understand what it was saying to me. And in the recording, I changed some of the quotes that he had said originally. ’No,’ she says. And because of that, it all began to make sense. So her position in it changed when I started to write it. And she’s a little more involved, she a little more up to shenanigans than I thought she originally was and that’s where it worked." (Tales of a Librarian EPK)

"As a composer, if something isn’t finished but has potential, you can’t just let it out. ’Snow Cherries’ was another one of these things. The conception began a long time ago, around the choirgirl era. We had tried to get it on tape, but it just didn’t come together for whatever reason. But we were playing around with it during the Scarlet tour. By this time Matt, Jon, and I had been playing night after night together, and we decided it was time to track it. You sometimes just get to a place where there is chemistry to all of this. It’s hard to define. But when we originally tried to record it we could never match what was coming out of a demo I’d made at the Beach House on my little crap recorder. Mark would always say to me, ’I hate to tell you this, but you haven’t quite been able to come close to that yet, I don’t think you should just settle.’ So we tried it on choirgirl and we tried it on Venus, but no luck. The three strikes you’re out idea was looming, but we recorded it again for the third time not knowing where it was going. Thankfully it just happened, it came together, because it was one of those ones I didn’t want to relegate to the bench. No riding the pine for this girl." (A Piano booklet)